Chapter Six
The next part is important because it’s the ordinary part, the last ordinary part for a long time.
Later, people said I was a pervert and a freak.
Reckless, unnatural, and hysterical. Oversexed, lecherous, wanton, and debauched.
But it wasn’t true. I courted very wholesomely—at least twice—before we got, as the kids used to say, jiggy with it.
The road to hell, you might as well know, is paved with dates to go get ice cream.
It was the day after the prom. He didn’t have a license anymore either, so we walked.
We didn’t share a banana split—we weren’t going to a sock hop after—but we did taste each other’s cones.
Mostly, though, we each ate our own. I licked my strawberry like a normal person.
Moth bit the end off his chocolate mint and endeavored to suck it through the bottom until an errant chip destroyed the hole and ice cream ran all down his front.
I handed him a pile of napkins.
“You must be quite a good mum,” he said as he mopped his shirt.
“Because I always have napkins on hand? Three kids. Force of habit.”
“Because you consented to move to Vista View despite dining-room food which is fairly off-putting and an ex-husband who …”
“Is also fairly off-putting?”
“So you must have done it for your children.”
Alice’s argument was that she’d already researched all the options two years before when she’d made Roger stop driving (the car he hit was unoccupied but parked.
And totaled) and she wasn’t going to do it again.
Darcy read the brochure cover to cover and reported that Vista View had three hundred and fifty independent-living apartments spread out over eight floors and four wings and therefore her father and I would barely share a zip code.
Max’s feeling was that if Alice had determined Vista View was the best available option given the relevant parameters, it was, and if I moved somewhere worse, then “You’re letting Dad win.
” But deep down, we knew, all of us, that it is easier to consolidate aging parents in one place.
Because that’s the argument for independent-living facilities, isn’t it?
If we just wanted to live independently, we could do that on our own.
(Irony.) We moved to Vista View for our kids, to make life better and easier for them, which wasn’t surprising since it was the reason we’d done more or less everything since the moment they were born.
And we did it so the decision was ours, while it still could be, because they were our children, not the other way around, and we didn’t want to burden them, not with our care, but before that, not with worry about our care.
Mine pretended—and I let them—that I was a menace on the streets and could no longer understand technology or kids today or navigate a rapidly changing world, as if the earth spun faster as I slowed.
It wasn’t a lie; it was a story, a myth, mutually embraced, clung to really, as all mythologies and folklores and faiths, in order to tame our fears, explain our mysteries, and guide our stars.
Really it was simple: If we waited till we had to, it was too late.
If we wanted to go on our own terms—and we did, we all did—we had to move to Vista View before we had to move to Vista View.
“Darcy is high-strung, with two teenaged girls, a workaholic husband, and a volunteer schedule as flexible as a two-by-four.” I handed over more napkins.
“Alice is an overloaded single mom with seven-year-old twins, Oliver and Pierre. She calls them O&P to save time. Max has two careers—one that no one understands, plus arm wrestling. Right now they need us. But soon we’ll need them.
And in both cases, it’s easier for everyone if we all live nearby.
” Not the entire truth but most of it, and I was betting he would understand, that his story and his reasons why would be a little different but a lot the same.
“Nice to have a big family.” This sounded casual, but there was a needled catch in his voice.
“Some days,” I allowed. “Darcy and Alice are named after their great-grandmothers, but Roger chose ‘Max’ because he thought DAM kids was funny.” Puns haunt me. “It’s not, but some days it’s accurate. What about you?”
“No children.” That sharp glint again. “My students, certainly, but none of my own.”
“What’d you get instead?” Grand adventures, I thought, a sideline in nature photography maybe, the kind of love story they make prestige TV about. Disposable income. Free time.
But he shook his head. “Nothing. My wife died.”
“Oh, Moth. I’m so sorry.” For this loss was the other reason people moved to Vista View. Already I could spot them, wandering the building half there, half somewhere else, the walking wounded, the missing alongside. “When did you lose your wife?”
“Louisa. It was a long time ago.”
“Really?” I hadn’t meant to sound so surprised, but I didn’t get it yet. At that point, it almost seemed like a non sequitur.
“Forty-two years in January,” he said. “More than half my lifetime. She was thirty-three.”
He reordered before my eyes. This was entirely different, disjointed, a tragedy out of time.
“We were going to have a big family,” he went on. “We just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. And then?” He turned up his hands.
I thought to say something generic, the sort of thing people say—“How awful,” “You must miss her very much,” “May her memory be a blessing”—but instead I said, “What kind of cancer?”
That nonplussed look again. “Breast. How did you know?”
How did I know? I could see it on him, something about the pale blunt trauma in his eyes, not just the trauma of death but the trauma of dying before that and before that treatment and before that diagnosis, each more horrible than the one before but only barely.
It was the veil that suddenly clouded his face, a shroud really, of hope offered then hunted then nursed then dwindled then taken away.
I saw all of that in Moth. And I saw it because I recognized it.
So I answered his question. “Because I had breast cancer too.”
All the blood left his face. “Oh, love. Oh no.”
“No, no.” I shook my head, shook away the dark. “It was a long time ago. I’ve been cancer free for years. Years and years.”
“I didn’t … I didn’t know.”
“Of course not.” I waved at my chest. “How could you spot such convincing falsies?”
He didn’t laugh.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t joke.”
“No, you should. If you can, of course you should.”
“I didn’t mean to raise unhappy memories.”
“Long life, lots of unhappy memories,” he said.
Was this the saddest assessment I’d ever heard?
Or merely true, axiomatic even? He smiled then—half smiled—and I could see him making himself do it, and I could see how hard it was.
“Though at my age, I suppose, I should be grateful to remember anything at all.”
I half smiled back.
Then he took his own advice and made a joke because he could. “What about you? When did you lose Roger?”
I laughed, relieved. “It’ll be twenty-five years later this week.
” Then I blushed. “It’s not like I count the days or anything.
It’s that we stuck it out until Max left for college.
” At which point it was a new start for everyone, a new life, at least a new time of life—not unlike now, really.
Roger hadn’t cheated. I hadn’t gambled away our savings.
He didn’t hit me. I didn’t shout. We’d changed since we got married, thirty years earlier, just not in the same direction.
We were lucky, in some ways, that neither of us wanted to be married anymore.
“And it’s like you said. Long life, lots of things you can’t forget, even if you want to. ”
With Roger, though, it was more complicated than that. The unhappy memories felt unhappy because they were warning signs heeded too late, because, looking back, I knew what came next. But the happy memories sometimes felt unhappy too. Because, looking back, I knew what came next.
Moth was undeterred. “I know just what we can do to celebrate.”
I knew that Moth had been making another joke, but actually it’s a holiday we observe in our family.
In fact, I think it’s because of the cancer that we do.
For lots of families, the parents splitting up is the nadir, but we had already been through worse and could tell the difference.
Long before mindful uncoupling or conscious coparenting or whatever nonsense this generation thinks they invented, we celebrated National Coming Apart Day.
Roger arrived at my door on the morning of the big day with bagels and coffees. We sat on my balcony and looked out over the green woods behind Vista View and reminisced.
“Remember when we went into the bank to close our joint account,” Roger said, “and the teller couldn’t stop crying?”
I laughed. “Didn’t we eventually give up and go back the next day?”
“I think you called ahead and asked for someone more jaded.”
“Remember when you needed towels for your new place and instead you bought washcloths?”
“I do remember, and so does my across-the-way neighbor because they were not full-coverage washcloths, and the curtains I bought were also too small.”
“You have a PhD, Roger. How do you not know how to measure things?”
“You got the good tape measure in the divorce!”
“I earned that tape measure! Remember when you called me twenty times a day because no matter what note you needed it was always in the margin of a book that was still on my shelves?”
“I remember how cranky you were about it every time.”
“Because I was not your research assistant!”
“Clearly.”
Our phones pinged simultaneously. A message to our family group text.
Max: Happy National Coming Apart Day everyone!
Darcy: [party hat emoji, party horn emoji, broken heart emoji, party hat emoji again]
Max: This day co-opts my identity you know
Alice: You named it
Max: We’re here! We’re divorced! Get used to it!
Darcy: National Coming Out Day is October 11
Max: [emoji of a cat, emoji of a bag]
Alice: Can someone pick up O&P from school today? I have an important meeting
Max: You always have an important meeting
Darcy: You always have an important meeting
Darcy: Damn it why am I such a slow texter?
Max: You’re old
Alice: You’re old
Max: I win [emoji of a flexing arm]
Alice: 3:15 by the flagpole. Anyone?
Moth’s idea was different, though. He knocked on my door that evening with a picnic.
“They have music and fireworks at the lake tonight,” he said. “My understanding is that Americans celebrate freedom with the latter.”
The fireworks were to mark the end of some kind of festival, not my marriage, but they were still a lovely idea.
We couldn’t hold hands because we had to carry the picnic basket between us, each taking a handle.
Whatever he’d packed was too heavy for one person, at least for one of the persons currently on offer.
“Do fireworks not celebrate freedom in England?”
“We tend to be the colonizer, I’m afraid, so we’ve rather fewer independence days to observe.”
“What about Guy Fawkes? Isn’t that fireworks?”
“Yes, but it’s not about freedom so much as vanquishing the bad guy and surviving nearly getting blown to bits.”
This was not inappropriate for a divorce celebration either, but I didn’t say so.
“We must make one stop along the way,” he said.
“Sure. Where?”
But he had already come to a halt.
I’d been at Vista View only a week, but I could tell already that the food was terrible, the decor institutional, the rules childish, the building sprawling, the apartments small, and the lectures focused on dirt.
Alice had chosen it anyway for one reason, however, and she was right about this part.
It was near things. It was near her. But it was also near the ice cream shop.
It was near the park. It was near a shopping center and a grocery store and a pharmacy.
It wasn’t even that far to my doctor’s office.
And better than all of those, even the ice cream, it was near a bookstore.
Moth set his half of the picnic basket down before its front windows, so I did the same.
“I thought we could buy each other a book.” He opened his hands, like at the end of a magic trick. Which maybe this was.
Dinner would wait. Dark would not. We had only an hour or so until the fireworks started, which wasn’t nearly enough time to make such a momentous decision.
Which book? What genre, even? Poetry? A novel?
Something scientific for the chemistry teacher in him?
A cookbook, the better to avoid the dining room?
A Collected Works of Shakespeare, which contained everything there was between its pages?
But we wouldn’t be able to carry it, not with the basket in tow.
So I had to pick a single play, a near-impossible task.
In the end, I went for: funny, romantic, and contains outdoor dining.
We met back out on the sidewalk to exchange our selections.
“As You Like It,” he exclaimed when he had his open—they’d gift wrapped it for me in the store. “I like it! ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’”
“That’s The Tempest,” I regretted to tell him.
“ ‘Reason and love keep little company together nowadays’?”
“Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“ ‘All the world’s a stage’?”
“That’s the one.”
“I knew it!”
He handed me mine.
“Anna Karenina?” It was a lovely edition, a matte black hardcover with light blue lettering and an accordion fan on the front.
“She also leaves her boorish husband,” he explained, “and finds love with a much younger man.” He wiggled overgrown eyebrows.
“You’re seventy-eight,” I said.
“How old is Roger?”
“Seventy-nine.”
“It’s like my biography.”
“She throws herself under a train at the end.”
“We all end up under a train at the end,” he said sagely.
It was a wonderful present. And a wonderful evening.
But still we went no further than even the most priggish Texan Sunday school teacher would happily sanction.